Most of the novice bloggers face the problem that their blog posts are not getting the right amount of attention that they deserve. By attention I mean that the post gets less traffic, comments or may be its not getting shared on social networking sites. A blog with no readers is like a book on shelf which no one wants to read. It feels quiet lonely when nobody is there to read your great work, to appreciate your content or point out your mistakes.

Signs to tell you that your posts are not getting adequate attention:

Here I have enlisted some signs which will tell you if your posts are getting adequate attention or not. If these signs sound familiar then I am afraid to say that your posts are victim of inadequate attention syndrome.

1. Your blog traffic is not growing: If your blog traffic is low and is not growing day by day. Then it simply means that your blog lacks loyal readers.
2. Nobody comments on your posts: You don’t get enough blog comments on your posts.
3. Your posts are not shared: Your readers do not share your posts their social networks.

If you have found out that your blog I suffering from less attention syndrome then you could read following possible reasons and tips to get rid of the same.

Reasons why your posts are not getting adequate attention:

Before heading onto the tips to get rid of inadequate attention syndrome it’s beneficial to have a look at the possible reasons for the same. Moreover, if you have found that your posts are getting less attention than they deserve, then you should check out the reasons behind it. I have listed down the most probable reasons:

1. Your content is boring for your readers: Many times you have a nice idea but when you write it down, it doesn’t come out to be that good. And the result is that readers are not interested to read your content.
2. Your content has a bad headline: These days only catchy headlines (post titles) work. If you have written a masterpiece and you dress it up with an old and boring headline, nobody is gonna come to read it.
3. You are not able to hold the attention of visitors: People on internet have shorter attention spans, so it takes only few seconds for them to decide whether they want to read an article or not. If your headline is impressive but your first paragraph is boring and you fail to welcome your visitors, then your visitors are not going to read your posts.
4. Site is Slow: May be a visitor liked your post and when he clicks to open that post it takes more than 10 seconds for the page to load. In most of such cases visitor will leave your site and search for some other faster site.
5. Your Content is not shareable: If a visitor likes your content and when he tries to share it with his friends he is just not able to find the sharing buttons (share widget). There are two possibilities of it the first one being that you don’t have used any sharing widget for your posts and the second possibility is that your sharing button are at some place which is not very easy to find.
6. Your Domain Name is difficult to remember: If a visitor likes your post and he decides to come to your blog daily, but next time when he types your URL he cannot recall it. So, your domain name has made you to lose one of your loyal readers. This is long run can kill your blog traffic.

Solutions to get adequate attention for your posts:

You could go through the below listed possible solutions to get the inadequate attention syndrome rectified.

1. Work on Your Content: Always make sure that your headline is impressive, your first paragraph is informative and engaging and your content is unique.
2. Work on your blog SEO: You need to work on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as it can give you most of your visitors. The visitors that you get from search engines are targeted visitors and they have come to your blog for getting information, hence it is quiet easy for you to convert them to loyal readers.
3. Work on Social Signals: Make your blog page on most of the well known social networking sites and encourage your readers to share your content.
4. Make your site user friendly: You on your blog cannot judge its user friendliness. So, for checking it I would suggest you to note the behaviour of a first time visitor on your blog.

• Note how he navigates to the posts
• How he reads the content.
• How he searches some other posts.
• How he tries to share the content.

After doing the above work you need to improve the user experience on your blog.

5.  Save your Best for the Last: I mean if at this time if your blog is not having so much loyal readers, then it is a good idea to save your best posts till the time you start getting some loyal readers. It’s no point in wasting your best if no one is there to read it.

Please note that this will work only in case your best posts are on some evergreen topics like this one, in case its related to some technology then it’s always suggested to share it at earliest as technology is evolving day by day.

Verdict:

In the end I would say that every well written and unique article has the potential to grab attention, and all you need for this is some loyal readers and the right audience. For example if you have a blog in tech niche and you write about meditation then your readers won’t be bothered to share and appreciate your post as they are more inclined to technical things. They are simply not the right audience for your post. So, first of all establish a blog stick to one niche and when you have some loyal readers of that niche, and then your posts are bound to get the attention that they deserve.

Happy Blogging.

Do share your feedback and queries in the comments section below.

Reading the blogs of Blogging Gurus gives us inspiration and we as a blogger dream about making the same amount of money someday.  But personally, I feel that reading blogs of these self proclaimed Blogging Gurus is of no use. I have been in blogging arena from a considerable time and I can assure you that most of these top rated bloggers simply waste your precious time. I know that this may sound somewhat bizarre but later in the post I will be highlighting some points that will give weight to my argument.

Who are these self proclaimed Blogging Gurus?

Actually you can identify these blogging gurus yourself, most of the top rated bloggers who just blog for self advertising or affiliate programmes come into this category. For the sake of content these bloggers are getting more dependent on the Guest Authors and these guest bloggers try to write a best piece of their life and they simply handover it to some blogging guru for publishing it in his blog.

I am not saying that these self proclaimed blogging geniuses are not great Bloggers. They definitely were the best bloggers of their time and they have written may great blog posts in past but now they are no more concerned in delivering the best they are simply reaping the profits.

Why reading Blogging Guru’s is a waste of time?

• As we all know that as these bloggers have established their image in front of their readers so they never try too hard to deliver the best content. They simply understand that they are the king of the time and people will come to read even if they write some below par content.
• They get hundred’s of Facebook likes, thousands of twitter shares, thousands of digs even for some crappy content. So these bloggers don’t care about Search engine optimisation as their referral traffic is so enormous.
•  Every second article they write is about some affiliate program, which is simply for their monetary purpose. The heading of these topics is like “How I got 20K visitors from blah blah..”, “How I made 10K dollars in a single day with XYZ product” and these catchy headlines fool the innocent budding bloggers.

I know that many of their affiliate products are very genuine but then if you have to become a successful blogger then it needs sheer dedication, products can automate certain things but Google is strictly against automation.

• As they know that they have an established blog, and Google respects their domain authority. So, there are times when they lag behind to cover a particular news event but they still are able to rank in the search engines as they have high domain authority.

I know there is nothing bad in this but, what about the budding blogger who covered the news before the big daddy?

• Their blogs are tightly packed with affiliate ads and this is not considered good from the reader’s point of view. All the time they are trying to sell things on their blogs. If they like selling so much they should launch some online shopping portal instead of negatively impacting reading experience.

Some people might consider this genuine as the blog belongs to them and they can publish any ads they want, but they should remember that readers have made them the market leaders and if they continue to impact the reading experience then readers can topple their crown of being Market Leaders.

Conclusion:

I will end up the above arguments saying all of the blogging Gurus are not like this. Definitely, there are other Blogging Geniuses that delicately bring out the best content every single day.

For the budding bloggers like me I would like to say that, budding bloggers can do better and they don’t need to follow any Market Leader or Blogging Guru. Just keep on writing the content that your readers love and one day you will also be one of the successful bloggers.

Happy Blogging

Google Penguin is the latest algorithm that has become a pain for the webmasters. This update is mainly aimed at removing and de-ranking the sites that are considered to be web spam. Now if you are new to this terminology then I must tell you that Google considers a site to be webspam if it is self promotional, low quality and fake, very similar to an email spam. According to Google these sites play gimmicks like keyword stuffing and all others sorts of Black Hat SEO, to manipulate the search engine rankings.

Statically saying this update has affected 3% of total websites on internet, as compared to the 12% sites that were affected by the Google Panda Update in past.

What is Google Penguin Update?

Few months back when Google Panda was on roll then many webmasters choose black hat techniques to get back their search engine rankings, but now Google Penguin is screwing such websites.

Google Penguin algorithm is mainly targeted at the websites that follow or have used black hat techniques like keyword stuffing, thin content, over optimised pages, excessive use of keywords and use of affiliate links with thin content. Simply saying, this update is targeting those sites that follow negative SEO practices.

Reasons why Google Penguin affected your site:

As I have foretold that Penguin is quite hard on the sites that use Negative SEO.  Some of the reasons that Penguin has affected your site can be:

1. Excessive Keyword Density.
2. Duplicate Content (Internal)
3. Duplicate Content (External)
4. Using malware or harmful codes in the WebPages.
5. Sending automated queries to Google.
6. Affiliate Links along with low value content.
7. Thin Content
8. Using Hidden text or links on WebPages.
9. Bad Out Bound Links

Websites negatively affected by Google Penguin:

Google Penguin algorithm has affected around 3% sites of the total websites present on Internet, so you can get the impression how big is this number. The big names that have been negatively affected by this update are:

• Digg.com
• geek.com
• cultofmac.com
• cubestat.com

How to know if Google Penguin has affected your Site:

Google rolled out the first version of Penguin algorithm on 24th April 2012. So, if your site has a sudden traffic drop after 24th April then there is a big possibility that your site is hit by Google Penguin.

If you feel that your site has been wrongly penalized by Google Penguin then you can tell Google about this mistake by filling this form.

A word of caution, if you are using any of the negative seo tricks to rank your site then your site is vulnerable for a Penguin slap. If it has left your site in this update but there is no guarantee that things will go your way even in the future updates.

How to recover from Penguin:

Google Penguin update is quite similar to the Panda update which Google launched earlier. And many sites that had been hit by panda latter recovered from it and thus I personally feel that Google Penguin recovery is also possible.

Now the big question arises how to recover from this update, logically you can recover from this update if you can roll back all the things that resulted the penalty for your site. These things can be:

1. Excessive use of keywords: The first point is getting rid from excessive keyword density. If you have found some posts with high keyword density then you should remove them or no-index them. Having an adequate keyword density is again a controversial topic but anything ranging between 2%-4% is good enough.
2. Duplicate Content (Internal): If on your blog you have made your archive, category and tag pages as indexed then it will probably harm your blog as these pages will have the duplicate content as of the original post pages. Hence, it is better to make these pages as no-index.
3. Duplicate Content (External): If some other blogs or scraper sites are copying your posts then you are at a risk of getting penalised by Google. Although Google is quite good in indentifying original content and copied content but still you should remember that it’s a bot and can be manipulated, though it’s not so easy but yet there must be some ways. The best thing to avoid this penalty is either make these pages no-index, remove them or add more unique content to these pages.
4. Using malware or harmful codes in the WebPages: Remove any malicious codes present on your site pages, generally webmasters don’t add these codes intentionally but if you have got your blog theme from some torrent or free download site then there is a strong probability that it can contain some malware or malicious codes inside it. So, always buy plugins and themes from trusted sites.
5. Sending Automated queries to Google: Webmasters sometimes use some software’s to automate the such queries feeling that it will upshot in Good SEO. But now Google is against these types of gimmicks. There is a simple solution to this; you can remove any script or plugin that sends automated queries to Google data centre.
6. Affiliate Links along with low value content: If your blog or site is indulged in selling affiliate products, then make it sure that your content is good enough to support these products. Low quality content can again make your site vulnerable for a Penguin Slap. Remedy is adding more valuable content to the pages where you have week or low quality content.
7. Thin Content: Thin content aka low quality content are the posts that do not provide any valuable content. According to a thumb rule the posts having less than 300 words come in this category. But this is not always true; you can even write a low quality post with 300+ words so for this I would say you are the best judge for thin content. If you feel any post is not providing adequate value to the readers then either research on that post again and update the topic or simply remove the post.
8. Using Hidden text or links on WebPages: Hidden text or links are the text or links that are invisible or inconspicuous. By this, I mean any text on the page that is having font colour same as the background colour can be considered as hidden text. Actually this type of text matches to the background and hence is unreadable for humans, but for crawler the text is reasonably readable. In previous days spammers tried to manipulate the search engine results by using keywords as hidden text but now this trick is of no use. If you have used any such technique then please stop using it further.
9. Bad Out Bound Links: Check your website’s outbound links, if your website is linking to some non reputable or un-trusted site apply a no-follow tag to that link. Your outbound links should appear as natural so the best thing is to make a balance between the dofollow and nofollow links.

How much time will it take to regain your traffic back?

Well this is a difficult question to be answered but if you have successfully resolved the issues that your blog was penalised for, then you would regain your traffic after the next Penguin Update. If you are thinking to file a reconsideration request then I must tell you that in algorithm updates reconsideration requests don’t work, they only work if there are any manual spam actions taken against your site.

Other effects of Penguin Update:

As you all know that if your site is slapped by Penguin then you are most likely to lose your traffic and hence this will also affect the Alexa rank of your blog as Alexa rank is calculated on the number of people with Alexa addon visiting your site.

Also if your site is penalized by Penguin update this simply means that Google considered your site to be a webspam. If during your penalty period there is a Page rank update then your site’s pagerank is expected to go down. But before the Page rank update if your site recovers from the penguin then there is no danger of losing your pagerank.

So, this was all that about Google Penguin update. Feel free to drop in your comments.

As we all know that Google Adsense is the leader of all contextual advertising networks. Many people out there are making thousands of dollars each day from it. But due to its strong TOS some people hate it. Also Google Adsense doesn’t allow blogs that are less than 6 months old to be a part of its network. And for these reasons today in this post I will highlight few Adsense alternatives.

What is the need of Adsense Alternatives?

Before starting with the topic I think, it would be a nice idea to draw your attention to the need of Adsense alternatives.

Firstly Google Adsense is having a very strict TOS, a simple change in your ads could result you into losing your Adsense account forever. So in such cases you should have a backup plan i.e. Adsense alternatives.

Secondly, people who have blogs less than 6 month old cannot get an Adsense approval. Personally saying, I agree with this because new blogs should initially try to become popular and later they can join any ad network.

Thirdly I would say that it’s not a good idea to keep all your eggs in the same basket. So, if you are a blogger making some nice income from Google Adsense then also I would suggest you to try other advertising network as there are many successful websites that earn more from other ad networks as compared to Adsense. So, you should try other ad networks as well.

So this gives rise for searching Adsense Alternatives.

Adbrite:

Adbrite is one of the oldest and popular adsense alternatives. Actually the whole concept of Adbrite is quite different from Adsense, as soon as you get an Adbrite account it starts displaying banners on your site and the people who are interested in advertising on your site can advertise through Adbrite. The revenue split up is 75/25. It is best for the blogs that get more traffic from US and UK. Also the terms and conditions are very relaxed as compared to Adsense.

Technorati Media:

Technorati Media is another growing CPM advertisement network. Technorati Media supports ads of multiple dimensions like 160X600, 300X250, 728X90. You can also use technorati Media along with Google Adsense ads. Minimum Payout is $50.

Clicksor:

Clicksor is another good alternative to Google Adsense. They support Contextual Ads (both banner and text formats). Most of the clicksor ads are popups, but these annoying popups are paid a bit higher as compared to their counterparts. Typically the revenue share is 60/40. Clicksor users say that they are more tolerant to accidental clicks than Google Adsense.

InfoLinks:

InfoLinks specializes in inline text advertising and hence it is totally different from Google Adsense. InfoLinks algorithm detects a page text and then inserts its adlinks under the text. Infolinks pays you as per clicks and not on the impressions on adlinks. Actually you can use infolinks as a secondary ad network along with google adsense or any of its alternatives.

Buysell ads:

Buysellads is another good option to Google Adsense. Once your blog gets approved by BuySellAds it gives you an html code which you can place on your ad spots. When any advertiser finds your blog and is willing to advertise on it, then he has to pay a flat fee for 30 days the fee is set by you. The best part is that you don’t have to get involved in accepting payments from individual advertisers, buysellads does this for you.

BidVertiser:

BidVertiser is another ad network that specializes in contextual advertising and feed advertisements. It has the same intelligence as Google Adsense to detect the page content and displays the most relevant ads on the page and thus can result into higher click through rates. I would suggest BidVertiser only to the blogs that have good traffic. The best part about BidVertiser is that they give you more versatility to display your ads than Adsense.

If you feel that we have missed some important Adsense Alternatives then please let us know in the comments section.

Favicon is the small icon displayed in the address bar next to the url. A website having a personalized favicon appears more trustworthy to the users. Moreover having a favicon also allows your blog or website to stand out from the rest.

So, today I will let you know how to add favicon to Blogger (Blogspot) blogs.

Steps to add Favicon to Blogger (Blogspot) blogs:

Lately Blogger has come up with various advancements and one of them is the facility to add customized favicons. Earlier in order to add a favicon you need to make the changes in the template code. But now its just a matter of seconds. So, fasten your seatbelts as we are going to get started. Please follow below listed steps to add favicon:

• First of all login to your blogger account.
• Now, click on the design tab.
• Now you will see the “Favicon” widget on  the top right corner.

• Click the edit button.

• After the window is loaded. You will see a button “Choose File”. Select it.
• Now after selecting this button you need to select the image that you want to upload as your blogs’ favicon. Please note that  ideally the image used for favicon must be 16X16 pixels and should be less than 100KB.
• After uploading the image click the save button and you are done.

This was the procedure to add favicons on your blog at Bloggers or Blogspot.

Note: I have observed that it takes some time for the favicon to be displayed on your page. So please take it easy of your favicon is not displayed at once on your page.

Bonus Tip:

In case you have not selected any favicon yet, then here is a bonus tip for you. Please find below compiled list of some of the online favicon creating websites:

1. Favicon.UK
2. Favicon.HTMLKIT
3. AntiFavicon

Using the above mentioned steps you can easily add Favicon to your Blog at Bloggers or Blogspot and make your website standout of the rest.

Please feel free to share your feedback in the comments section below.

Happy Blogging

Backlinking is an important thing in Search Engine Optimization. For those who are new to SEO, backlinking is simply a process of putting your blogs or websites link(URL) on some other page (blog or website). In this article I am going to guide you on how to find DoFollow blogs.

So simply we can say that backlinks are links that are directed towards your website. Backlinks are important for SEO because search engines, especially Google gives more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks. Actually from Google’s perspective DoFollow links are a kind of vote for a website or blog. It also helps in passing the pagerank juice.

The main difference between a NoFollow and DoFollow link is that NoFollow attribute tells the spider (search engine bot or crawler) not to crawl that particular link whereas the DoFollow attribute tells the spider to crawl the link.

The easiest way to build backlinks is blog commenting on do follow blogs. If you choose this method then you must keep this thing in mind that you should only drop insightful comments to a blog. Making some general or spamy comment won’t be of much help to you as the blog author don’t approve spamy comments. So, Today I am going to share ways to find dofollow blogs for commenting.

Method 1: The first method is based on google image search.

First of all go to google images.
Search for some strings link: “U Comment, I follow”, “We are do follow”, “ifollow.gif”
Now the resultant images will be from do follow blogs and you can drop some insightful comments on them.

Method 2: Method 2 is quiet simple.

Visit this page .
Here we have compiled a list of around 1500 dofollow blogs.

Enter any query and the results will be only from do follow blogs so that you can comment on them and  get a free do follow backlink.

Happy Commenting